RockMongler

Baking soda is good if it is an acidic based cleaning product. Another option, if it is a basic cleaning product, would be to rinse with some vinegar (good ol' acetic acid). Alternating between those, and just a lot of fresh water to flush everything out, should be sufficient.

Yeah, it's probably still usable, I would just make sure to rinse it off very very very VERY well. I imagine the cleaner is water soluble, so make sure it is exposed to lots and lots of fresh water before you make use of it. Is it a hang on back filter, or canister filter, or something else completely?

I don't think parasites are a big problem with people having snails in their tanks. Atleast, I don't think that's one of the usual complaints I've heard. Most people get annoyed at them because they don't like the look, and if you over-feed, they can boom in population. I gladly keep bladder and malaysian trumpet snails in my tank. I think they look cool, and they definitely help with algae and other cleanup around the tank. In my opinion, they are a good foundational part to making a miniature ecosystem, rather than just keeping a tub of water. Now, even with sponge intake covers, I do get snails clogging the final intake into the powerhead. That is just something I have to get into and clean out every so often. It's more than worth it for the other positives snails bring.

If you are really worried, pouring over boiling water is probably fine. Most critters that can survive for more than a few moments in water that hot, are probably not critters that will be happy or healthy in a fish's body, and most critters that we would worry about in our tanks will die *very* quickly when exposed to such elevated temps, even for very short periods of time. Look at how pho gets made. They pour boiling broth on raw beef (thinly sliced) or shrimp (often sliced in half), and the heat from the water causes the meat to get cooked pretty much instantly (remember that cooking is going to physically change and rearrange and 'destroy' the proteins as they would be normally used). Dumping boiling water into the bucket should very quickly end any nasties you don't want. People mostly boil wood for longer when prepping for a tank to leach out excess tannins so it doesn't stain your tank, not so much because such a long boil is necessary to sanitize it.

That sounds like that could just be the heater doesn't think it's getting enough flow over itself to work as efficiently as it would like. The flow in your tank is probably fine for the fish, but the 'smart' heater doesn't like it. I would assume it's probably fine, but I'd also look and consider what others have to say (I currently don't operate any heaters in any of my tanks, so I say this without having used a fish tank heater in over 20 years).

Hopefully it will help him chill out! I've not personally kept bettas, but I do know they can have a wide variance in personality. You might just have a particularly ornery individual who is just cranky at the world for daring to exist in his presence. Hopefully the change in lighting will help him chill out though.

One way you should be able to reduce reflections inside the tank would be to have more light outside the tank perhaps, as @James Black said. That's how 1-way mirrors work. If the inside of the tank is bright, and the outside isn't, the light reflecting off the glass will be more obvious, and your betta is probably seeing himself clearly with that lighting. If you have more light on the outside, there will still be reflections, but they will be faded out relative to the light passing through the glass.

You might find it to be more effective in your tank. I have a 20 wide with a stream flow manifold, and the actual side to side flow is.... not what I was wanting. There is some amount of side to side flow, but I haven't been able to have it do anything besides circular flow or a super kind of high flow on one end with very chill slow flow on the other end. I have a single powerhead on one end, and two sponge-covered intakes on the other end. The fish seem pretty happy about it with how I have it now, so I probably won't mess too much with what works. And by happy I mean my minnows will spend some time hanging around in the high flow area 'playing' in the flow, and my hillstream loaches don't spend all day hiding, they have grazing and basking spots spread around the tank they spend time that I can actually see them. You can see the overall structure in this picture. Streamflow manifolds I think work best if you have a relatively shallow, but long tank. Something with the same width and height as a 20 long, but significantly longer would probably be able to get a decent side to side flow, but finding the sweet spot of enough flow to be noticable, but not so much flow the non-benthic (non-bottom dwellers) just get thrown around like a tornado, is not super easy.

You have a small amount of ammonia and a buttload of nitrite, and a decent amount of nitrate. How do these readings compare to your tap water you started with? Assuming your tap water doesn't have a lot of nitrite or nitrate to begin with, you look to be trucking along on the cycling process. You will know you are done when the nitrite always reads blue, and the ammonia reads yellow. Keep an eye on that nitrite, and when it comes back blue instead of purple, you should be great! That means your beneficial bacteria are doing their job and making nitrates from ammonia and nitrites. edit: your pH is kind of high, are you using crushed coral as your substrate?

The biggest issue I see with that assumption is that a lot of the oxygen picked up by the cascading water could get sucked up by the bacteria that are living there, but that is assuming the worst possible case. Someone else might see other issues. If I had a sump, I'd probably still get an airstone in that area just because it has zero downside besides possibly sound/electric usage. But, I'm the person with a 20 wide with a hang on back, and a stream flow manifold and an airstone. I go with overdoing it because I don't want to risk not doing enough.

This is one of those situations where the plants are far more accommodating than animals. Keep them submerged in (treated) tap water, perhaps give a squirt of easy green, and perhaps even get some light on them. I know I have taken plants on the road after keeping them in a bucket for a few days (I was visiting my parents for a few days over thanksgiving, and purchased them when I visited a LFS that was a half-hour drive from their house the wednesday before, and drove the plants home on Saturday morning). The plants (some kind of hygrophila) probably would have been happier with more light during their stint in the bucket, but were fine, and are still thriving.

Yeah... In my own tank, I've seen hydra grow to big populations, and I've also seen them crash down to where I don't see them for weeks or months, with little intervention on my part. I managed to rid myself of staghorn algae mostly by making sure I wasn't getting too many areas of very low flow, and cutting back on lighting hours and intensity. Just know that different plants may have different light requirements. I ended up keeping my java moss/anubias/java fern towards the periphery of my tank, and I have some flavor of hygrophila in the center, and that has worked out well keeping me (mostly) algae free. At least, I'm algae free enough that the tank still looks fine. Just know that it isn't an overnight fix. Algae, especially things like staghorn, can bloom slowly, so it can also die back slowly. I know the staghorn I had, you could tell when it was pooping out because it would go from a white-grey-greenish color to a noticeably red color. I personally did not have terribly great results with seachem excel and staghorn; I think I was dosing too much, and not changing water enough in the process. It can kill if you spot treat, but if you have a lot, it's a slow, multi-day or multi-week project. I ended up losing a juvenile white cloud and maybe some shrimp.

If it doesn't continue to clear up on its own, I'd say clean it with a brush like like you might use for cleaning dishes. That should be able to get into any nooks and crannies and pull any gunk in there out, assuming the light and snails don't do it on its own. With the pictures you posted, it honestly isn't super obvious (but as I'm sure we all know, tank photography is hard and capturing what you actually see can be tricky). If you hadn't said there was a stain, I probably would have just attributed it to lighting/texture.

Its probably some flavor of low light algae, fungus, or bacteria. Exposing it to light is probably doing all the work of getting rid of it for you. Before, it was probably the right mixture of nutrients and light, and now that you have disturbed it, it's probably going to shrink back and not be much of anything. You'd probably know if you had any significant amount of hydrogen sulfide. The human nose is very sensitive to it even at low concentrations (IIRC, ~ 5 ppm is enough for your nose to get that very specific rotten egg smell, and your nose burns out to being able to sense it ~12 ppm, again if I remember some of my safety training materials).

An update! The tank has definitely grown in a bit. The java moss on the left needs reworked a bit. I think I need to clip the good growing tips, and go attach those directly to the piece of wood that is under there. Everyone is pretty happy. Even the loach you didn't see stuck onto the bottom of that chunk of Repashy. I re-did the spreader bar, and I am happier with the slightly more concentrated flow I get on the right side of the tank. Thinking about getting a better way to take pictures of the tank, because my phone just isn't as good as I'd like. I extended my WCMM population The only creatures that seem to be successfully reproducing is the invertebrates. Lots of shrimp and snails making copies of themselves. I suspect the snails and shrimp are gobbling any loach or WCMM eggs that get laid. Still very happy with how this tank has been working out.

Airstones are a great, cheap, effective and easy way to get more oxygenation (but isn't free unless you already have an air pump lying around). A cheap airstone and cheap air pump will do a super great job of getting the oxygen levels up to match the oxygen levels of the air in the room your tank is in. But, what does your current filtration look like? Water moving near the surface can also do a decent job of gas exchange, and keep your dissolved O2 in a good range, but depending on how many critters you have and how the water gets out of your current filter, some of that oxygenation might not be getting down to where the corys are spending their time. Floating plants can also possibly interfere with that oxygen exchange, so the amount of water lettuce could also be a culprit.

That could still be useful as a hospital or slow-growing plant tank. And I think shrimp and snails would be very happy to help keep those plants from getting too much excess algae. Biggest thing to remember with putting more substantial critters like fish in a tank that small is how quickly waste can build up. Less water volume = more water changes to keep parameters stable. Most snails and shrimp tend to have a fairly low bioload. Personally, I'd be a bit spooked with a 1.5 gallon and how quickly the water could get fouled up if something goes wrong for much more than snails and plants.

I know in my tank at night when I look, my white cloud mountain minnows tend to dull their colors and sleep. My oto and hillstream loaches seem to get out and about from hiding places and seem to do more stuff at night compared to the day, though they aren't always hiding all day either. My red cherry shrimp... they appear to just keep on doing shrimp stuff, day or night. Even when I lost power during the big Texas freeze, the red cherry shrimp were just as active when the tank got cold and was running on battery air alone. I tend to see more of the other inverts coming out at when the lights are off. The malaysian trumpet snails are fairly scarce during the day, but they 100% come out in force at night. Same for bladder snails. I also tend to see some of my resident population of planaria visible on the glass if I shine a light at night.

That looks to me like it is some form of planaria (or flatworm). Is it a big deal? I have them in my tank, and my various critters (including neocaridina shrimp that are breeding like mad) seem to not really be bothered. So, I don't try particularly hard to get rid of them in my tank. As an anecdote, I mostly seem to find a bunch of them in the water column when I service my powerhead (the intake gets filled with bladder/malaysian trumpet snails and really reduces flow, and after I clean it the flow goes high, and a bunch seem to get pulled through the system by that increased flow) and my white cloud mountain minnows will pick those ones up as a free snack.

Shrimp or snails are usually fine for a smaller volume like that! I keep my small 2.5 gal available as hospital tank. A tank in that size might also be a decent place to culture slower growing plants like java moss

The biggest thing I would worry about with them in a betta tank is temps and preferred conditions. They prefer cooler, more oxygen rich moving water compared to a betta. Bettas prefer slower moving warm water, and can tolerate lower oxygen levels because of their labyrinth organ. During the big freeze in Texas, my 20 wide got rather cold (~50 F), but the hillstream loaches were seemingly not caring at all. I'd have worried significantly about a betta getting that cold, but I had no problems in my tank. I have also kept hillstream loaches in a 10 gallon. But, in said 10 gallon, a betta would have been miserable. Far too much flow, and far too cool. As long as you keep your water quality good and well oxygenated, you should be fine, though. Just know that lower water quality and oxygenation will probably hit the loaches before the betta/CPDs. As to what Jayci said, they can definitely be territorial with one another. A dominant one will pop up, and chase off the less dominant ones from the 'preferred' grazing/chilling locations.

It looks like it is probably some kind of borneo sucker, which is a type of hillstream loach. Remember, hillstream loaches are a fairly large category of fish!

Warning, images of wounded fish below. I've gotten home from work today, so I can post a picture of the fish in question. The tank is kind of a funny, almost superman logo shape, so getting a good picture and lighting is a challenge. I wasn't able to get a good picture of them where I can see their damaged fin, but you can clearly see the wound on top of their head. I will likely keep them in the hospital tank for a week or so for monitoring, and see how their healing progresses with aquarium salt as a treatment.

I have cherry shrimp breeding well in my 20 gallon wide community tank, and the best hiding places seem to be the big clumps of java moss. I also have a fairly coarse substrate, so I also think they disappear into that to get away from the bigger critters as well. I started out with ~6, now I easily have over 30.

The wound on top of their head could very well be them running into a rock. I have some local stand stone that goes a good job of picking up lots of biofilm, and is a super popular grazing spot for everyone (but the WCMM who seem to only eat exclusively from the water column/surface). It was a fairly quick, and easy water change. I use a plain ol' siphon to gravel vac/remove water. I also mostly focus on easily accessible portions of the substrate for gravel vaccing during most water changes specifically to avoid moving hardscape too much for the exact reason that the hillstream loaches are super good at sticking to and hiding in weird little spots, and I also place repashy specifically in the more open spots. The tank is a 20 wide. The pile of cobbles on the right side of the tank is the most common place the loaches chill out besides the glass. Later today when I get home from work, I should be able to get better pictures of the injured fish. The thing that worries me the most was the fins having specific, fish mouth shaped and sized pieces missing. It being injured by a rock shifting around during the water change would make me less stressed in the long run, but still upsets me in the short term.